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Patria's salmorejo is tomato soup made transcendent

Over the course of a year, we eat so many crappy tomatoes. They are pulverized, obscured with garlic and spread out over delivery pizzas. They are roughly diced, their flavourless, off-season juices left to bleed out over a salad in January.

A ripe Ontario tomato is an object of beauty, best when sprinkled with a little salt and pepper and gobbled up, perhaps with a wedge of cheese. It’s hard to argue against doing any more with or to it.

Life is better during tomato season, when the fruit finds its way onto every plate. During the period of abundance, we ought to expand our horizons.

Often for this column, I try to figure out which item, on a menu of maybe two-dozen dishes, would best suit the Toronto Star reader (you).

Recently, I was in the kitchen at Patria, where chef Stuart Cameron showed me two tomato-based recipes. They were both so good that I held on to the second one, as it is entirely dependant on prime season tomatoes.

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“Basically, the soup is kind of a Spanish gazpacho,” he said as he introduced the salmorejo, part of his brunch menu. “But more textures on top, with ham and all that kind of stuff. Inside, it’s kind of a bread soup, the flavour of bread in the soup as a puree. And the way you make the soup is so easy.”

The chilled soup is, as he says, a puree of tomatoes and bread, emulsified with olive oil, thick enough to be called a sauce. It’s then garnished with boiled egg, Spanish ham, bread crumbs and chervil (or any type of fresh herb), so it has all these textures: creamy, smooth, crunchy, fluffy.

It takes the joy we have in dipping a crust of bread into a bubbling tomato sauce, and refines it into an explosive, refreshing spoonful.

“ ‘Soup isn’t brunch’? Soup’s amazingly brunchy,” spat the chef at my suggestion. “We don’t do a lot of eggs. I think that’s what I like about our brunch menu.”

First the chopped tomatoes are pureed in a blender, then strained to remove the seeds.

The bread is placed in the liquid tomato, squeezed a bit and left to sit.

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“It’s just all about ingredients and how you use them,” he says, demystifying the soup, which will taste a lot more complex, as if it had many more ingredients.

But it’s really just about getting the maximum impact from a tomato.

“All our tomatoes, we age. Not overripe, but close.”

Given that no one’s tomatoes or bread slices are going to be the same size, the dish requires the cook to exercise some common sense, in order to end up the right consistency. It should be thick enough that garnishes sit on top, but not so thick that it won’t slide if you turned the bowl upside down.

The tomatoes and bread are returned to the blender, with a little garlic and sherry vinegar. At this point, Cameron began to thin the mixture out with tomato water. In a restaurant that uses concasse (the peeled, seeded and diced flesh of a tomato), the juicy tomato guts are left to sit in a strainer overnight and the liquid that seeps out the bottom, clear but intensely flavoured, is tomato water. At home I use a can of tomato juice.

Once the flavour is right, a thin stream of olive oil is poured into the blender while the motor whirs, whipping the mixture into a glossy state.

And that is it for the soup. You can store it in the fridge or serve it right away.

For garnish, Cameron brought out a leg of serrano ham, carving off little strips. I asked if prosciutto would be a good substitute and he looked at me as if I’d suggested garnishing it with dog.

Another hunk of bread is fried into bread crumbs, toasted in a pan with olive oil and garlic. And a hard-boiled egg is grated, white and yolk separately, on a microplane.

The final pureed soup is salmon hued. But topped with the white and yellow of the egg, green herbs, golden bread crumbs and vermilion ham, it’s a kaleidoscope of colour.

It’s so good, transcendent really. Often when chefs are showing me a dish, I take a bite to remember the taste and texture, then gather my notebook and say goodbye. But as Cameron moved on to show me the next dish, an egg baked in tomato, I picked up the bowl and greedily shovelled the salmorejo in my mouth.

Salmorejo

1 egg

3 slices sourdough bread

5 tbsp (75 mL) olive oil

2 garlic cloves

4 ripe tomatoes

2 1/2 cups (625 mL) tomato juice

2 tsp (10 mL) sherry vinegar

3 slices serrano ham

Fresh herbs, lightly torn

In a large pot of boiling water, cook egg for 9 minutes. Chill in ice water. When cool, peel and separate yolk from white. Separately grate or chop each and set aside.

Take one slice of the bread, remove the crust and tear it into small bits. In a large pan on a medium high heat, sauté bread in 2 tbsp (30 mL) olive oil with 1 clove garlic, until crispy, about 12 minutes.

Quarter tomatoes and puree in blender. Pass through fine mesh strainer into a large mixing bowl. Cut 2 slices of the bread into large chunks. Soak the bread chunks in the tomato puree and let sit 10 minutes.

Return tomatoes and bread to blender. Add tomato juice and puree. Add vinegar, oil and blend for a couple minutes, until it is shiny. Season to taste.

Tear the ham and herbs into small bits. Serve soup in bowls garnished with egg, bread crumbs, ham and herbs.

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